Americans will bet more than a billion on the Super Bowl. Do faith leaders care?
(RNS)— Legal betting is bad for bettors and society alike, said gambling critic Kathleen Benfield. 'It's a house of cards,' she said. 'And it’s going to fall.'
Betting odds for Super Bowl LIX are displayed on monitors at the Circa resort and casino sports book Thursday, Jan. 30, 2025, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher)
Bob Smietana
February 7, 2025
(RNS) — Les Bernal has a message for the millions of Americans who will bet on this year’s Super Bowl using betting apps and other legal sports books.
The house always wins.
Which means you will likely lose.
“We laugh it off and say, oh the house always wins,” said Bernal, national director of Stop Predatory Gambling, an anti-gambling nonprofit founded by a Methodist minister in the 1990s. But Americans lose billions gambling, he said, while sports-betting companies rack up profits.
Once considered a vice and the realm of Vegas casinos and organized crime, legal commercial sports betting has become America’s favorite pastime. Americans are expected to bet $1.39 billion with commercial gaming companies during Sunday’s Super Bowl — to be held Feb. 9 in New Orleans, pitting the Kansas City Chiefs against the Philadelphia Eagles — according to projections from the American Gaming Association.
Since the Supreme Court struck down a 1992 federal law that limited legal sports betting to Nevada in 2018, $450 billion has been wagered on sporting events in the United States, according to Legal Sports Report, a website that covers the sports-gaming industry. Sports-betting company revenues have reached nearly $40 billion. Much of that growth has been driven by online and mobile betting, which essentially turn cell phones into sports-betting windows, say critics like Bernal.
Les Bernal. (Courtesy photo)
Data from a 2024 AGA survey found that 88% of Americans see gambling as an acceptable form of entertainment, and many (76%) see gambling as good for the economy. Gaming industry officials see rising revenue as a sign that Americans love to bet — and that legal betting is a good thing.
“No single event unites sports fans like the Super Bowl, and that excitement extends to sports betting, with this year’s record legal handle reflecting its widespread appeal,” Bill Miller, AGA president and CEO, said in a recent press release, referring to the total amount bet on the big game.
The success of the gaming industry has critics like Bernal and faith leaders who oppose sports betting often fighting an uphill battle. They have little money to work with — Stop Predatory Gambling, for example, has a budget of $138,000. And because the gaming industry is regulated by states, there’s not a national coalition of gambling critics. (Thirty-nine states currently allow legal sports betting, though some, like Wisconsin and Washington, restrict wagers to in-person betting sites.)
Bernal, who is Catholic, said commercialized gambling is the only business where the relationship with customers is “adversarial and predatory.”
“They want to take you down,” he said.
The advent of smart phone apps and online betting and the growth of parlay bets — where bettors wager on a series of outcomes in a game, like which player scores the first touchdown — has changed the nature of sports betting, he said, allowing customers to place repeated bets on the same game.
“They made sports gambling like playing a slot machine,” he said, and have made betting more addictive and socially harmful. He’s particularly concerned about the overall business model of gaming companies, where customers with gambling problems provide most of the profits.
For example, at PointsBet, a sportsbook owned by Fanatics, a major company, 70% of the revenue came from less than 1% of the customers in 2019 and 2020, according to The Wall Street Journal.
THE TRUE BELIEVERS
A 2024 report from the University of Massachusetts found that 90% of revenue at that state’s casinos came from only 10% of customers, which researchers found problematic.
The Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles participate during Super Bowl 59 Opening Night, Feb. 3, 2025, at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, ahead of the NFL championship game this Sunday. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
“There needs to be a reduction of the industry’s financial reliance on at-risk and problem gamblers, as the 90% of revenue from this 9.9% of the population is much too high,” researchers wrote in the report’s recommendation. (That report looked at casinos, not online sports betting.)
As a Catholic, Bernal said he was concerned that state governments are essentially benefiting from problem gamblers in the form of tax revenue. “We’re talking about loving our neighbors like God loves us,” he said. “This public policy is the complete opposite.”
In Minnesota, where mobile sports betting is illegal, the state’s Catholic bishops wrote to Governor Tim Walz recently, urging him to oppose making such betting legal. Jason Adkins, executive director of the Minnesota Catholic Conference, the public policy voice for Catholics in that state, said expanding gambling is not worth the cost.
Adkins said Catholics don’t see all games of chance, such as raffles or bingo, as unethical, but commercial sports betting is something different, with little social benefit and a great deal of harm due to gambling addictions.
“When you put a sports book in the cell phone of every person and give them 24/7 access to the most addictive forms of gambling and then make it easy to chase their losses with in-game betting, we think this is a serious problem,” he told Religion News Service in an interview.
Kathleen Benfield. (Photo courtesy Louisiana Family Forum)
Kathleen Benfield, legislative director for the Louisiana Family Forum, said her organization has long opposed legalized gambling — seeing it as a public health risk. She pointed to a recent study in The Lancet, which outlines the social harms of gambling.
“Gambling is not an ordinary kind of leisure; it can be a health-harming, addictive behaviour,” the summary of the Lancet study read. “The harms associated with gambling are wide-ranging, affecting not only an individual’s health and wellbeing, but also their wealth and relationships, families and communities, and deepening health and societal inequalities.”
Benfield believes nothing good will come from legalized gambling in the long run.
“It’s a house of cards,” she said. “And it’s going to fall.”
A new national survey of sports fans by Sport Spectrum, a faith-based magazine, found that few people saw sports betting in a negative light. Only 23% said they felt negative about sports betting, while 43 percent said they felt positive about sports betting. A third (35%) felt neutral. A third (32%) said they had bet on sports. Twenty-seven percent said they know of someone who’d been negatively impacted by sports betting
Few sports fans felt enthusiastic about betting being part of sports broadcasts, with 28% seeing that as positive, and 40% seeing it as negative. A third (32%) were neutral.
Andy Konigsmark, a Presbyterian minister from Colorado, is among those who think that sports gambling can be an enjoyable experience, if done within limits. Konigsmark said that his parents, conservative Christians who taught Sunday school, would take him to a dog track while on vacation and give him a few dollars. He said betting made watching the race more exciting — and having only $5 meant the stakes were low.
Konigsmark said these days, he occasionally places a bet on a sports-betting app.
“I could spend $20 a month on this — and that’s it,” he said. “It’s the same as going to the movies.”
(Image from Pixabay/Creative Commons)
If he were betting every day, or for larger amounts of money, that would be a problem, said Konigsmark. And he’d like to see fewer gambling ads on television and more limits on what people can bet. He also said faith leaders could do more to help their people think through the issue. This past fall, he wrote an online article entitled, “A Christian Minister’s Guide to Gambling with Wisdom,” to do just that.
Benjamin Watson, an author and college football commentator who played 16 years in the NFL, said the rise of sports gambling has had little effect on players so far. Fans have time to think about gambling and fantasy sports, he said, while players are focused on trying to win. While pro sports teams and broadcasters have ties to gaming companies, he said, for the most part players are isolated from those concerns.
“It doesn’t impact what we do on the field,” Watson said.
Watson, who played in a pair of Super Bowls — winning with the Patriots in 2004, losing with the same team in 2007 — said he’d learned to be grateful in both outcomes. Winning and losing is part of life, he said, adding that “losing is terrible.”
“God is in control,” he said. “My goal is to glorify Him, whether I win or whether I lose, there’s still growth that happens across the board.”
Watson, who comments on college games for the SEC Network and other sports media, said he does not bet on sports — in part because he hates to lose. And he has no interest in promoting gambling.
“There’s a lot of data that’s come out, a lot of studies, showing that gambling is not beneficial on a cultural or a wholesale level,” he said. Those studies, he said, show increases in bankruptcies and addictions. So much so that ads for sports betting often come with a warning about those addictions.
“I’d just rather stay away from it,” said Watson, who is known for his outspoken advocacy of social issues like racial reconciliation and his opposition to abortion. “I don’t see the benefit.”
Flunking Sainthood
Is it OK for Mormons to bet on the Super Bowl?
(RNS) — U.S. Latter-day Saints seem more accepting of gambling than in the past, according to a recent survey, despite the church’s consistent and total opposition.
The Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles participate during Super Bowl 59 Opening Night, Feb. 3, 2025, at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, ahead of the NFL championship game this Sunday. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
Jana Riess
February 6, 2025
(RNS) — This coming Sunday (Feb. 9), as the Kansas City Chiefs battle the Philadelphia Eagles in the Super Bowl, many Americans will wager on the game for money. ESPN is reporting legal bets on the game should amount to $1.39 billion, to say nothing of the billions more that will be wagered informally (and sometimes illegally).
Utah is not one of the 38 states that now permit some form of legal sports betting. In fact, the historically majority-Mormon state has no forms of legal gambling at all — not so much as a state lottery.
This can largely be attributed to the deep and long-standing influence The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has in the state, where it is headquartered. Even if self-identified Latter-day Saints/Mormons are no longer the majority in Utah’s state population, their influence runs deep.
The church has had a consistent, even unequivocal policy against gambling. Its website states that “gambling is motivated by a desire to get something for nothing. This desire is spiritually destructive. It leads participants away from the savior’s teachings of love and service and toward the selfishness of the Adversary. It undermines the virtues of work and thrift and the desire to give honest effort in all we do.”
The policy then jumps very quickly to the worst-case scenario, saying those who gamble waste money, sacrifice their own honor and lose the respect of friends and family. “Deceived and addicted, they often gamble with funds they should use for other purposes, such as meeting the basic needs of their families. Gamblers sometimes become so enslaved and so desperate to pay gambling debts that they turn to stealing, giving up their own good name.”
Not a lot of wiggle room there. The church is clear that gambling is wrong, and doesn’t seem to make any distinction between dilettantes who play the lottery on occasion and hard-core gamblers who lose everything to full-blown addiction.
What’s interesting is that a growing number of U.S. Latter-day Saints seem to be adopting more of a live-and-let-live approach to the question. In the 2016 Next Mormons Survey, only 14% of Latter-day Saint respondents put gambling in the “morally acceptable” category, with 56% saying it was “morally wrong” and 30% considering it “not a moral issue.” A majority, then, agreed with the church’s position that gambling as immoral.
The 2022–23 NMS2, by contrast, showed 19% saying it is morally acceptable, 44% calling it morally wrong and 37% not seeing it as a moral issue.
So the share of those who believe gambling to be immoral dropped by 12 points. Those points are nearly evenly distributed between those who think gambling is moral and those who don’t consider it a moral issue.
Some of the expected findings apply here. Latter-day Saints outside Utah are more accepting of gambling than those who live in the Beehive State; men are more accepting than women; and younger people are more accepting than the oldest respondents.
But the overall finding — that fewer than half of LDS respondents now see gambling as morally wrong — surprised me. (Perhaps that’s because I personally agree with the church here in that I don’t see much good in gambling. I have personally witnessed some very sad stories of how it’s done harm. In my mind, however, there’s a world of moral difference between Grandma buying a Lotto ticket and someone going full-on Al Capone.)
We did not have a survey question about whether respondents engaged in gambling or sports betting themselves, so the survey can’t shed light on Latter-day Saints’ actual behavior on this issue. But the softening of disapproval is interesting.
One possible reading is that this is a clear sign of secularization: As U.S. society becomes more accepting of gambling and less tied to religious leaders’ old-school condemnations of it, Mormons are affected by that too. “Cohort replacement” — which is a nice way of pointing to the presence of younger people in surveys as older people die — is a factor too.
But there’s another possible interpretation, and it’s the exact opposite of the secularization thesis, which is that in this matter, as in many others, Latter-day Saints are playing Follow the Leader. By this I mean that even though the church’s anti-gambling policy has not changed and is clearly posted on its website, it hasn’t been emphasized for a long time.
As a General Conference topic, the high points of gambling or betting being mentioned were in the 1940s and 1950s, and again in the 1990s. That corresponds well to times when gambling was very much in the news — in the midcentury period because of a string of gambling scandals, and in the 1990s and early 2000s because of the growing trend of state legalizations and riverboat casinos.
President Gordon B. Hinckley, in particular, hammered home this concern, including in a hard-hitting 2005 conference talk in the men’s priesthood session. Bemoaning the growing proliferation of different kinds of gambling, Hinckley reiterated the dangers of getting involved in it in any way, however innocuous.
In the 1990s and 2000s, gambling was mentioned 42 times in General Conference. In the 2010s and so far in the 2020s, it’s only come up six times. Given that reality, it’s possible that some younger members of the church don’t even know about the church’s long-standing opposition to gambling, or whether something like betting on the Super Bowl would “count.”
Sorry to be a literal spoilsport, but it does: Section 38.8.17 of the church’s Handbook specifies that its opposition “includes sports betting and government-sponsored lotteries.” There goes your Super Bowl loophole.
Is it OK for Mormons to bet on the Super Bowl?
(RNS) — U.S. Latter-day Saints seem more accepting of gambling than in the past, according to a recent survey, despite the church’s consistent and total opposition.
The Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles participate during Super Bowl 59 Opening Night, Feb. 3, 2025, at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, ahead of the NFL championship game this Sunday. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
Jana Riess
February 6, 2025
(RNS) — This coming Sunday (Feb. 9), as the Kansas City Chiefs battle the Philadelphia Eagles in the Super Bowl, many Americans will wager on the game for money. ESPN is reporting legal bets on the game should amount to $1.39 billion, to say nothing of the billions more that will be wagered informally (and sometimes illegally).
Utah is not one of the 38 states that now permit some form of legal sports betting. In fact, the historically majority-Mormon state has no forms of legal gambling at all — not so much as a state lottery.
This can largely be attributed to the deep and long-standing influence The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has in the state, where it is headquartered. Even if self-identified Latter-day Saints/Mormons are no longer the majority in Utah’s state population, their influence runs deep.
The church has had a consistent, even unequivocal policy against gambling. Its website states that “gambling is motivated by a desire to get something for nothing. This desire is spiritually destructive. It leads participants away from the savior’s teachings of love and service and toward the selfishness of the Adversary. It undermines the virtues of work and thrift and the desire to give honest effort in all we do.”
The policy then jumps very quickly to the worst-case scenario, saying those who gamble waste money, sacrifice their own honor and lose the respect of friends and family. “Deceived and addicted, they often gamble with funds they should use for other purposes, such as meeting the basic needs of their families. Gamblers sometimes become so enslaved and so desperate to pay gambling debts that they turn to stealing, giving up their own good name.”
Not a lot of wiggle room there. The church is clear that gambling is wrong, and doesn’t seem to make any distinction between dilettantes who play the lottery on occasion and hard-core gamblers who lose everything to full-blown addiction.
What’s interesting is that a growing number of U.S. Latter-day Saints seem to be adopting more of a live-and-let-live approach to the question. In the 2016 Next Mormons Survey, only 14% of Latter-day Saint respondents put gambling in the “morally acceptable” category, with 56% saying it was “morally wrong” and 30% considering it “not a moral issue.” A majority, then, agreed with the church’s position that gambling as immoral.
The 2022–23 NMS2, by contrast, showed 19% saying it is morally acceptable, 44% calling it morally wrong and 37% not seeing it as a moral issue.
So the share of those who believe gambling to be immoral dropped by 12 points. Those points are nearly evenly distributed between those who think gambling is moral and those who don’t consider it a moral issue.
Some of the expected findings apply here. Latter-day Saints outside Utah are more accepting of gambling than those who live in the Beehive State; men are more accepting than women; and younger people are more accepting than the oldest respondents.
But the overall finding — that fewer than half of LDS respondents now see gambling as morally wrong — surprised me. (Perhaps that’s because I personally agree with the church here in that I don’t see much good in gambling. I have personally witnessed some very sad stories of how it’s done harm. In my mind, however, there’s a world of moral difference between Grandma buying a Lotto ticket and someone going full-on Al Capone.)
We did not have a survey question about whether respondents engaged in gambling or sports betting themselves, so the survey can’t shed light on Latter-day Saints’ actual behavior on this issue. But the softening of disapproval is interesting.
One possible reading is that this is a clear sign of secularization: As U.S. society becomes more accepting of gambling and less tied to religious leaders’ old-school condemnations of it, Mormons are affected by that too. “Cohort replacement” — which is a nice way of pointing to the presence of younger people in surveys as older people die — is a factor too.
But there’s another possible interpretation, and it’s the exact opposite of the secularization thesis, which is that in this matter, as in many others, Latter-day Saints are playing Follow the Leader. By this I mean that even though the church’s anti-gambling policy has not changed and is clearly posted on its website, it hasn’t been emphasized for a long time.
As a General Conference topic, the high points of gambling or betting being mentioned were in the 1940s and 1950s, and again in the 1990s. That corresponds well to times when gambling was very much in the news — in the midcentury period because of a string of gambling scandals, and in the 1990s and early 2000s because of the growing trend of state legalizations and riverboat casinos.
President Gordon B. Hinckley, in particular, hammered home this concern, including in a hard-hitting 2005 conference talk in the men’s priesthood session. Bemoaning the growing proliferation of different kinds of gambling, Hinckley reiterated the dangers of getting involved in it in any way, however innocuous.
In the 1990s and 2000s, gambling was mentioned 42 times in General Conference. In the 2010s and so far in the 2020s, it’s only come up six times. Given that reality, it’s possible that some younger members of the church don’t even know about the church’s long-standing opposition to gambling, or whether something like betting on the Super Bowl would “count.”
Sorry to be a literal spoilsport, but it does: Section 38.8.17 of the church’s Handbook specifies that its opposition “includes sports betting and government-sponsored lotteries.” There goes your Super Bowl loophole.
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